1. Summary information
The Gaza cybergang is an Arabic-language, politically-motivated cybercriminal group, operating since 2012 and actively targeting the MENA (Middle East North Africa) region. The Gaza cybergang’s attacks have never slowed down and its typical targets include government entities/embassies, oil and gas, media/press, activists, politi

Zimperium’s core machine learning engine, z9, has a proven track record of detecting zero-day exploits. We recently announced an extension of the framework that detects previously unknown mobile malware. This extension is known as “z9 for Mobile Malware”, and was officially announced in September 2017. Internally, the code name has been “Cogito”, so this res

What is DoubleLocker?
Security researchers at ESET discovered a new ransomware infecting Android phones called DoubleLocker. DoubleLocker is an exploit that encrypts data on the infected device and then changes the device PIN to a random number. Victims remain locked out of their device unless they pay a ransom to the hackers.
DoubleLocker spreads in the ver

By Jason Gu, Veo Zhang, and Seven Shen
We have disclosed this security issue to Google, who verified that they have protections in place against ZNIU courtesy of Google Play Protect.
The Linux vulnerability called Dirty COW (CVE-2016-5195) was first disclosed to the public in 2016. The vulnerability was discovered in upstream Linux platforms such as Redhat,

During the preparation of the “IT threat evolution Q2 2017” report I found several common Trojans in the “Top 20 mobile malware programs” list that were stealing money from users using WAP-billing – a form of mobile payment that charges costs directly to the user’s mobile phone bill so they don’t need to register a c

The Trojan-Banker.AndroidOS.Faketoken malware has been known about for already more than a year. Throughout the time of its existence, it has worked its way up from a primitive Trojan intercepting mTAN codes to an encrypter. The authors of its newer modifications continue to upgrade the malware, while its geographical spread is growing. Some of these modifi

Targeted attacks and malware campaigns
Back to the future: looking for a link between old and new APTs
This year’s Security Analyst Summit (SAS) included interesting research findings on several targeted attack campaigns. For example, researchers from Kaspersky Lab and King’s College London presented their findings on a possible link between Mo

Introduction
Zimperium discovered and reported a fake version of the popular Snapchat app in the official Google Play Store; At the time of our discovery, it was the second result when searching for “Snapchat”. The fake version of Snapchat app is using “Snap Inc .” as Company Name, with a ” .” appended to original name.
Fake

In mid-July 2017, we found a new modification of the well-known mobile banking malware family Svpeng – Trojan-Banker.AndroidOS.Svpeng.ae. In this modification, the cybercriminals have added new functionality: it now also works as a keylogger, stealing entered text through the use of accessibility services.
Accessibility services generally provide user interf

A flashlight app, fake videos or a fake gaming app? Any one of those could be malicious and harboring a mobile malware app, right there in a trusted official app store. In an ongoing trend, IBM X-Force noted that malicious apps manage to circumvent controls and infiltrate legitimate stores. And this is not about the plethora of adware apps infecting users in

Introduction
In this blogpost I describe the history of z9, our detection engine. I will show its performance over reference data sets commonly used in the machine learning community. I’ll then describe how we apply it to detect networks attacks without any type of packet inspection.
Eventually, we encourage you to participate by helping us gather and

I’ve been monitoring Google Play Store for new Ztorg Trojans since September 2016, and have so far found several dozen new malicious apps. All of them were rooting malware that used exploits to gain root rights on the infected device.
Then, in the second half of May 2017 I found one that wasn’t. Distributed on Google Play through two malicious a

In April 2017 we started observing new rooting malware being distributed through the Google Play Store. Unlike other rooting malware, this Trojan not only installs its modules into the system, it also injects malicious code into the system runtime libraries. Kaspersky Lab products detect it as Trojan.AndroidOS.Dvmap.a.
The distribution of rooting malware thr